Ask Paul: June 19 ⭐

Happy Friday! We're winding down after a week in Nashville, which has been fantastic despite the heat and humidity. But we're not done yet, so let's get this weekend started.
"Microsoft confirms Recycle Bin bug across all versions of Windows"

It's never really recycled anything when you think about it

🪟 Always in motion is the future
spacecamel asks:

Any word on Windows 12? I am wondering if this new direction to improve Windows 11, that Windows 12 (or whatever they call it) will be pushed back some.

We've been talking about Windows 12 since, well, Windows 11 arrived, though Microsoft has never even suggested that such a thing is coming. (Until interesting, go figure, when it said ahead of Build that it would not be announcing Windows 12 at the show.) But this talk really gained steam in 2023, when Microsoft jumpstarted the AI era that went on to be dominated by others, first OpenAI with ChatGPT, and then Anthropic Claude, Google, and all the rest.

The history there is interesting.

In early January 2023, before Microsoft announced what it later named Copilot, I wrote Maybe AI is the Next Wave (Premium) because of rumors that Microsoft would soon announced OpenAI ChatGPT-based features for Bing. I explained Microsoft's investments in OpenAI and its work on what we now call local AI, starting with Surface Pro X, the first Surface PC to include a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). And then-Windows lead Panos Panay had said that "AI is going to reinvent how you do everything you do on Windows ... quite literally." At the time, the local AI innovations required Arm CPUs, which were otherwise terrible, but we knew those capabilities were coming to x86 CPUs soon, too. And so I figured that was the dividing line: Windows 12, as I called it, would require an NPU.

I followed up that previous article with Welcome to the AI Era (Premium) after Satya Nadella said that Microsoft would bring the new ChatGPT-based AI capabilities to "every Microsoft product." But that article, like Nadella, focused on Office and Microsoft 365. So In early February, I wrote This is Windows 12 (Premium) in an attempt to bring it all together. Windows 12 would differentiate from Windows 11 by requiring an NPU and it would include whatever mix of local and cloud AI. (I was half-right: The cloud AI stuff would just come to Windows 11 while the local AI stuff would come to Copilot+ PCs a year later.)

Then Microsoft began using the Copilot name. It announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, and then, at Build 2023, that Copilot was coming to Windows 11. And then it raised the bar on enshittification by delivering Copilot in Windows 11 one month ahead of the major version upgrade, 23H2, that was to have included that feature. It did so to force it on its corporate customers, which would have otherwise skipped 23H2 and delayed the spread of Copilot in Windows 11 for a year. So in October 2023, I wrote Waiting for Windows 12 (Premium), reflecting on what had happened and...